"Low-Cost Trigger-Pullers": the Politics of Policing in the Context Of

WORKING P A P E R “Low-Cost Trigger-Pullers” The Politics of Policing in the Context of Contemporary ‘State Building’ and Counterinsurgency WILLIAM ROSENAU WR-620-USCA October 2008 Prepared for the United States Communications Agency This product is part of the RAND National Security Research Division working paper series. RAND working papers are intended to share researchers’ latest findings and to solicit informal peer review. They have been approved for circulation by RAND National Security Research Division but have not been formally edited or peer reviewed. Unless otherwise indicated, working papers can be quoted and cited without permission of the author, provided the source is clearly referred to as a working paper. RAND’s publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. is a registered trademark. NATIONAL SECURITY RESEARCH DIVISION “Low-Cost Trigger-Pullers” The Politics of Policing in the Context of Contemporary ‘State Building’ and Counterinsurgency William Rosenau Abstract: The ongoing counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have alerted US policymakers and practitioners to the importance of civilian police in countering insurgent movements. Although the role of the police in counterinsurgency is receiving greater attention, there are at least three critical shortcomings in the understanding of the role of the police forces to the current practice of counterinsurgency and ‘state building’ or nation building. First, counterinsurgents have failed to appreciate the fundamentally political nature of external assistance to ‘host nation’ police forces. Second, counterinsurgents have allowed, and at times encouraged, embattled governments to misuse civilian police forces, with serious negative consequences. Finally, a state-centric view of the overall approach to counterinsurgency has resulted in ignoring, or at best minimising, the withering of the ‘state’. This has, in turn, ensured that that the important role that ‘non-statutory’ structures could play in providing the public safety services necessary has not even begun to be considered with any degree of seriousness. There is a broad consensus that police forces have important roles to play in counterinsurgency. But relatively little attention has been given to what their roles should be, or how to organise, train, equip, and deploy them. This paper will not attempt to address all these issues in a comprehensive way. After providing an overview of both the canonical and current writing on counterinsurgency doctrine, the paper will consider a set of formidable challenges surrounding efforts of “outsiders” to create, rebuild and reform police forces to perform counterinsurgency roles and missions. Threatened regimes typically employ civilian police as auxiliaries (or to put it more graphically, as low-cost “trigger- pullers”) to the armed forces, which I will argue is ultimately self-defeating with respect to counterinsurgency. Employing the police in this fashion leads inexorably to the neglect of what should be the primary police mission: the protection of the public from serious crime. This paper will also argue that decisionmakers, analysts, and practitioners have underestimated the difficulty of inducing embattled governments to undertake the measures required to establish genuinely public-service oriented police institutions. Exporting police reform is a formidable and challenging project, particularly when the recipient state is embroiled in an internal war. Iraq and Afghanistan provide classic contemporary examples of these problems and they are the focus of what follows. However, it should be noted that it is beyond the scope of a paper such as this to provide an across- the-board assessment of policing and counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. Finally, this paper will explore a major development in international politics that US counterinsurgency policies and strategies have so far failed to address. In most of what is still described as the “developing world”—that part of the planet where insurgencies are most likely to occur—the state is in full- blown retreat. American policy and strategy has long been premised on the notion that state-building is central to success in counterinsurgency. But what should the approach be when the state is hopelessly enfeebled and beyond repair? Under such conditions, people typically look beyond the state for security, and have found it in a rich assortment of private, corporate, - 2 - ethnic, and community-based institutions. Unfortunately, US counterinsurgency remains wedded to a narrow, state-building agenda that regularly misuses state-organised policing organisations and completely ignores the potential contribution of non-state policing structures. Successful state-building means moving well beyond the organisation and use of “low cost trigger- pullers.” In the Shadow of the Malayan Emergency: Counterinsurgency theory and doctrine, past and present An earlier generation of writers, who were at the peak of their influence and prestige in the 1960s, considered policing an indispensable component of counterinsurgency. Without a doubt with the British campaign in Malaya (1948-1960), was and is still frequently cited as the outstanding example of how police should be used against armed rebels.1 For Americans struggling to defeat an elusive and wily guerrilla adversary in South Vietnam, and eager to find non-military responses that were both cheaper and more effective, civilian police offered a potential solution. Why was the police contribution in Malaya and elsewhere deemed to be so valuable? Two leading theorist-practitioners, Robert Thompson and Robert Komer, saw one feature as particularly salient: the routine contact of the police with the civilian population. Thompson, who was a senior civil servant during the campaign against the Malayan Communist Party, and went on to serve in the 1 See for example D Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: US Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present, New York and London: The Free Press, 1977, p. 43; and JA Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency - 3 - 1960s as Britain’s chief military adviser in South Vietnam, noted that the police force “is a static organization reaching out into every corner of the country and will have had long experience of close contact with the population.”2 Komer, a forceful former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst and a National Security Council (NSC) staff member who later served as the chief civilian pacification official in Vietnam, argued in a May 1962 paper that the police were closest to the “nests of discontent” among the population, and were therefore in an ideal position to detect and root out communist subversion, particularly in its earliest manifestations.3 For Komer, the police offered an important additional benefit, namely, the ability to suppress civil disorder with a minimum of force compared to the military—an important consideration in any “hearts and minds” strategy.4 Thompson identified a second advantage the police had over the military: their relatively low cost. In Thompson’s estimate, policemen were “at least one and a half times” cheaper to train, equip, and maintain.5 Writers during counterinsurgency’s golden age also stressed the importance of the police intelligence role—specifically, that of police special branch. In Thompson’s view, special branch was Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 91-93. 2 R Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam, Studies in International Security: 10, London: Chatto & Windus, 1967, p. 85. 3 Quoted in W Rosenau, US Internal Security Assistance to South Vietnam: Insurgency, Subversion, and Public Order, London and New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 91. 4 Ibid., p. 91. 5 Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency, p. 109. - 4 - in essence an intelligence organization, albeit one with arrest or “executive” powers, capable of operating in concert with national-level intelligence organizations (e.g., Britain’s Security Service, or ‘MI5’), and able to draw on the resources of the conventional police deployed around the country.6 Indeed, in the view of some contemporaneous analysts, the police should have the primary responsibility for gathering human intelligence (HUMINT) during counterinsurgency campaigns, as it is only the police who have the organization, presence, and contacts with the population to collect such intelligence.7 Additionally, police were expected to contribute to the modernization process, the “nation-building” of its age. In the view of counterinsurgency theorists, insurgency was in part a by- product what was termed “underadministration.”’8 Weak governments, unable to broadcast power across their entire national territories, allowed insurgents space (political, economic, and even physical) in which to operate. Therefore, more government, and better government—modelled on progressive, mid- twentieth century, American lines—were needed to extend the states presence into the hinterlands, provide essential services, and counteract the insurgents’ attempts to meet the “revolution of rising expectations.”9 6 Ibid., p. 85. 7 See for example J J McCuen, The Art of Counter-Revolutionary War: The Strategy of Counter-Insurgency, London: Faber and Faber, 1966, p. 114. 8 See for example D Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, New York and London: Frederick A. Praeger, Publisher, 1964, p. 30. 9 DM Shafer,

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